On Monday, March 21st 2011, there was a rally in front of the Nevada Legislature Building. A bunch of college students from all over the state gathered to protest the budget cuts to higher education that were being tossed around the Senate and Assembly. I headed down there to check out the party and the spectacle, and I’m glad I did because over 1,000 people showed up! Some are saying that this is the biggest protest/rally that Carson City has ever seen. Students gathered on the lawn in front of the building, swarmed the halls, and even filled the visitor galleries in both chambers.

Winter finally paid a visit to Carson City. After six weeks of Spring time throughout January and February, Mother nature finally decided to wake up and dump some snow on us. And it was a good size dumping too, at least 6 inches, more in some parts of town. We went to Lake Tahoe and I sunk in fresh powder up to my thigh! But it’s good to finally get some snow, even though we were getting a taste of Spring and got used to it. We’re having a few sunny days now, so all the ice can melt off the roads, but by Thursday we’re supposed to be back under the grip of another storm system. I wonder how long winter will last this year?

The last time I wrote about pogonip, I got a correction that these ice crystals should more properly be considered a hoar frost, or rime frost. It is the fog itself that is pogonip, from the Shoshone phrase for “freezing death”, the idea being that if you breathe it in the crystals will form in your lungs and bad things will happen. I think the etymology is probably correct, but we have built a regional identity around the word “pogonip”, taking this cool frost that forms in a lot of places around the world, and in some small way making it our own.

I bought a new point and shoot at work for the engineers to use when they do site inspections, a Canon PowerShot SD1400. Of course I can’t get my hands on a new camera without squeezing off a few shots for “testing” purposes. It strikes me how slow point and shoots are compared to DSLRs, yet they are attractive because of their small size. And the image quality on these new cameras isn’t horribly worse than my SLR, better than an iPhone for sure. But I still can’t justify spending the money to get a point and shoot for myself. They’re fun to play around with, though.

We weren’t sure if we were going to be able to see the lunar eclipse Monday night. It had been snowing and raining all weekend, and the forecast called for the weather to continue through the week. Even Monday through the day it was mostly overcast. But after sunset the clouds parted and the stars came out, and we ended up having a perfect, if cold, opportunity to view a total lunar eclipse.